Water: proof that nature doesn't want you to have a good time. You die a choking, agonised, maddened death without it, but it has no taste, just a non-flavour flavour of wet nothing. It's most unfair. "Still or sparkling?" is a grim question, a sploshing cash cow for a greedy restaurateur and a fabricated quandary for a customer. Imagine what people would say if you started doing rounds of water in the pub.

And in recent years, we've witnessed the continual tarting up of water and its hilarious overbranding, its sudden role as a plastic-coated lifestyle accessory. Consider, too, the rise of those ghastly mucked-around-with waters, medicinal vitamin drinks with weird, spectral, whispering flavours and limp-wristed untaste.

Squash and cordials form part of a similar trend – they make water more interesting. A scant dribble at the bottom of the glass, topped up with water, is a cheap way of getting flavour, the simplest non-alcoholic cocktail of all.

What's the difference between squash and cordial? "Squash" was originally short for lemon squash, though the name has of course spread to other flavours. The first cordials were tonics in Renaissance Italy, booze-based medicines flecked with pearls or poppies. These placebos supposedly treated any number of ailments, especially of the heart. In France they came to be known as "liqueurs", and thence in English too, and from them stem Fernet, Campari, crème de cassis and plenty of others. Victorian cordials were snake-oil tinctures or de Quinceyan cocktails with names like Dr Winklethwaite's Colonic Tonic. The modern use of "cordial" seems to have emerged towards the end of the 19th century, after Lauchlin Rose found a way to preserve lime juice without using booze. Rose's Lime Cordial Mixer was originally medicinal, based on the healthy principle of sailors taking limes to sea. Gradually, though, "cordial" came to denote the mixer.

Cordials are popular in the UK and the Commonwealth, far less in the States. The closest American equivalent is probably Kool-Aid, a vile powder concocted in 1927 in a hideous building in Nebraska. I've never liked Kool-Aid's dull, chemical notes, and even though it was wrongly implicated in the Jonestown Massacre (those pitiable, deluded people actually drank laced Flavor-Aid), "drinking the Kool-Aid" has become a byword for blind, unthinking acceptance of a creed or philosophy.

Kool-Aid marks the nadir of the squash world – of which its membership is admittedly dubious – but you can see a ready, steady ascendance from such grim laboratory gunge to the fancy additive-free stuff squeezed from pomegranates and pears. Vimto also languishes near the bottom. This was invented in 1903 as a murkily fruity weapon for the Temperance League, whose goal it was to tempt Britons from the scourge of evil liquors, presumably by making them vomit at the thought of drinking anything other than God's own cholera-piqued water. For some reason, Vimto is popular in the Arab world, and earlier today I spent a very strange 20 minutes watching Saudi adverts for the stuff on YouTube. This one, where a husband and wife hit each other with a cricket bat, was among the more baffling.

A notch up the quality list is Ribena, on which I've always been keen. The purple stuff is now owned by GlaxoSmithKline and has had some thoroughly dodgy advertising over the years, though it enjoyed a pretty innocuous, even noble start. In world war two, Churchill's government realised that blackcurrants represented a reliable domestic source of vitamin C after the U-boat campaign had all but stopped Florida oranges from reaching Britain. Since 1942, as the ads still boast, almost the entire national crop of blackcurrants has been pulped and sugared into Ribena. Large numbers of British children were given unbranded blackcurrant cordial to stave off scurvy for much of the war.

But in 2001 the Advertising Standards Authority gave Ribena a bollocking for having misleadingly claimed that Ribena Toothkind didn't encourage dental decay. And in 2004, two New Zealand schoolgirls embarrassed the mighty conglomerate by revealing that GSK's claim that local ready-made Ribena contained 44% of a person's recommended daily vitamin C was flagrant balls. It actually contained, er, 0%, and GSK had to pay NZ$217,500 in fines.

Arguably Britain's most familiar squash is Robinson's, forever netted to Wimbledon in a sponsorship deal that's now lasted three-quarters of a century. Perhaps it's just the fuzz of familiarity, but I find something appealingly sentimental in the combination of the old sweet drink and the white-clad competitors. It seems far less cynical than soccer players advertising insurance companies and Thai lagers.

Posh cordials seem to have emerged a decade or so ago, and now a great syrupy slew comes from high-end companies like Belvoir and Rocks. I reckon Bottlegreen make by the far the best cordials on the market today. Their standard elderflower – queen of classic cordials – is delicious, their ginger and lemongrass winningly spicy. But something else about them intrigues me. Browsing the website of this homespun little company, I came across their product manager Ed Wright. Our Ed is fond of rugby and hunting, and from his Meet the Family slot he cheerily boasts, "I dislike The Guardian!" Ah well. I'm sure we can all salute him cordially.